I have used FreeBSD in the past with no problems. I tried it out around 4.2, and used it as a primary desktop OS after Nvidia released their first GLX drivers. I tried revisiting it recently, and it is giving me nothing but trouble. See below:

1) When booting, if there is a USB hard drive attached I get an instant kernel panic right after it is detected.

2) I can unplug my USB drive and the system will boot. However, during boot my other USB devices (mouse/keyboard) drop connection and I have to unplug them and plug them back in to have them reactivate.

3) NVidia driver does not work for me. I was able to boot into X using "nv" driver, but when I compiled nvidia-driver from ports and ran nvidia-xconfig, I get an error about "/dev/nvidiactl" not being found and X will not boot.

This was with 7.0-RELEASE. The same problems persist with PC-BSD 1.5.1 which is based on 6.3-RELEASE. In fact, when I select the "nvidia" driver during the initial boot, my system hard locks when testing the screen. I have no problems with Linux on this computer, and even Solaris works perfectly with the NVidia drivers and all attached USB devices. Also, I am able to run "special" versions of OS X Leopard with no problems on this machine. Only FreeBSD gives me these problems. OpenBSD boots up normally.

Just remember that memory on these boards is dual channel. It is fine for debugging purposes, but once you prove to yourself that it works, you will have to consider what you do about reaching 3 - 3.5 GB with standard modules.

Or you might conclude that "nv" is good enough -- that's usually the case unless you need 3D for something like gaming, or you use dual heads.

Just remember that memory on these boards is dual channel. It is fine for debugging purposes, but once you prove to yourself that it works, you will have to consider what you do about reaching 3 - 3.5 GB with standard modules.

Or you might conclude that "nv" is good enough -- that's usually the case unless you need 3D for something like gaming, or you use dual heads.

Hello DrJ,
thank god that i saw your post! i have been trying to nail this issue for months... it had occurred to me that only freebsd has this strange memory size limitation, not windows or linux.
after reading your post, i couldn't find anything talked about on this topic through google. i would like to learn more why memory relocation is a problem in this scenario, and why memory size <3GB would work but not more. could you give me some references to read?
thanks a lot again